Cost of renewable energy’s variability is dwarfed by the savings

Wear and tear on equipment costs millions, but fuel savings are worth billions.

The variability of renewable energy sources like solar and wind has raised concerns about how well the US electrical grid could tolerate high levels of them. Some of the early estimates suggested that the grid couldn't handle having more than 20 percent of its electricity coming from intermittent sources without needing a major overhaul. But thanks to improved practices and a bit of experience, several states are already pushing that 20 percent limit well in advance of having a smart grid in place.

Adjusting for intermittent power sources primarily comes from cycling traditional fossil fuel plants on and off to match supply with demand. And that cycling has a cost in terms of wear and tear to equipment and fuel burned without producing electricity. So the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) produced a series of studies to look at these costs and how they compared to the savings in fuel that doesn't get burned. The answer: the cost is a tiny fraction of the ultimate savings.

Solar and wind power have very distinct profiles. Solar varies the most over the course of a day, but the general outline of solar production is very predictable even if the total power delivered varies a bit with cloud cover. Wind tends to be steadier, but the total amount being produced can change at any time of day.

To compensate for this variability, electricity suppliers essentially have to turn sources on and off. Since wind and solar have minimal operating costs—they burn no fuel—attention turns to coal and natural gas. Depending on the design of the plant, switching them on or off entails a variety of costs. Fuel gets burned without producing electricity when the plants cycle up, and a changing state entails an increased level of wear-and-tear on the equipment. Some of this went on before renewables entered the mix, but solar and wind are clearly increasing the frequency.

So, what are the costs? To find out, NREL commissioned a company called APTECH that had previously been hired by plant operators to estimate these costs. With these costs in hand, the NREL team analyzed the grid in the Western US under a number of different scenarios where intermittent renewables accounted for 33 percent of the total power. These scenarios included an even split between wind and solar sources and both 25 percent/eight percent (wind/solar and solar/wind) splits.

As expected, costs did go up. Cycling the fossil fuel plants added between $0.47 and $1.28 to each MegaWatt hour generated. Over the course of a year in the Western US grid, that adds up to between $35 and $157 million, a boost of between 13 and 24 percent.

That's the bad news. The rest is pretty much good. The fuel savings from not running the fossil fuel plants adds up to $7 billion, meaning the added costs are, at most, two percent of the savings. The fuel burned when spinning up the fossil fuel plants also makes a minimal contribution to pollution, either in the form of CO2 or in terms of nitrogen and sulfur compounds.

Perhaps the most significant news, however, is that the worst problems come earlier in the transition to renewables. "In terms of cycling costs," the report notes, "there may be a big step in going from 0 percent to 13 percent wind/solar but a much smaller step in going from 13 percent to 33 percent." In other words, once the percentage of renewables reaches a critical point, then the amount of adjustments we have to make becomes incremental.

This doesn't yet mean that all renewable power is cost effective compared to fossil fuels; wind is very close, but solar is a bit further. With current trends, however, we're only a few years away from that point. And this report indicates that once we get there, there won't be any significant additional costs to adding them to the grid.

135 Reader Comments

Nice! HECO (Hawai'i Electric Company) seems to be dragging on solar options for consumers, limiting how many hikes can have panels. I hope this spurs more people into pushing solar and wind for Hawai'i, as our energy costs are high, and we're not what I'd call in a good position should energy problems arise.

It would be nice if these cost savings would translate directly into lower energy costs at the outlet. Unfortunately, as is suggested by the last paragraph, energy costs are going up in most places where alternative energy is popular faster than inflation. It's hard to sell people on savings that never get to their pockets.

Germany with their aggressive timetable is expect to reach 20 cents a KWh in a few years and up to 40 cents when their transition to a more renewable sources come online. Sure it is possible, do you want to pay 40 cent a kWh?

Germany with their aggressive timetable is expect to reach 20 cents a KWh in a few years and up to 40 cents when their transition to a more renewable sources come online. Sure it is possible, do you want to pay 40 cent a kWh?

Yup I call bullshit on the study. Germany is trying it and the savings clearly do not outweigh the costs. Renewable are freaking expensive and increasing the ratio even more so because the whole transmission framework needs to be upgraded.

Its amazing how studies like that ignore reality.

You do realize that the article was about one specific class of costs, and the final paragraph put those costs into the context of the general cost of renewable power? Or did you not read that far?

Nice! HECO (Hawai'i Electric Company) seems to be dragging on solar options for consumers, limiting how many hikes can have panels. I hope this spurs more people into pushing solar and wind for Hawai'i, as our energy costs are high, and we're not what I'd call in a good position should energy problems arise.

Agreed, on Maui MECO limits residential solar PV installations to something like 10% of a "circuit's" capacity. I am not exactly sure what the circuits are but they cover geographical areas. Since electricity on Maui costs over 30 cents per kWh, and considering the tax rebates, PV systems pay off in less than 10 years. As a result, many areas on Maui are already hitting MECO's limit, stalling further adoption. Hopefully they will increase the limit as they gather and analyze more data.

Maui also has some large wind installations and some of the island's electricity is produced by burning leftover sugar cane biomass, which I guess is technically renewable. Of course, the population (and density) is pretty low.

In the long run, fossil fuels are only going to become more expensive (temporary natural gas glut notwithstanding), so it makes sense to develop renewable technologies now. But certainly they make more sense in certain locations than others.

Germany with their aggressive timetable is expect to reach 20 cents a KWh in a few years and up to 40 cents when their transition to a more renewable sources come online. Sure it is possible, do you want to pay 40 cent a kWh?

The issue with saying something like "renewables are 40 cents and fossil fuels are 6 cents" (or whatever the actual numbers are) is that there's a hidden externality cost to the fossil fuel that isn't reflected in the price on your utility bill, mainly because we're having political difficulties in handling those externalities. If using fossil fuels brings about catastrophic climate change that ends civilization, wouldn't the "cheap" fossil fuels end up being way more expensive?

I've not read the entire report yet, and I'll be leaving soon, but here are a few things this phase did not cover.

-- System reliability and stability issues were not the focus of this study either, but are being-- examined in Phase 3 of WWSIS.

-- Adding new, low-priced baseload generation can also cause the incumbent fossil-fueled plants-- to cycle more and have lower capacity factors (Milligan et al. 2011). An incumbent fossil-fueled-- plant that now has a lower capacity factor (and likely reduced revenue) and a higher O&M cost-- (because of cycling) might have a hard time remaining viable. This raises questions about who-- should pay for the cycling costs of incumbent plants or what happens in the marketplace to -- address the viability of a plant that might be needed for reliability but might no longer be profitable.-- These questions are not addressed in this technical report.

Also, the report appears to be based upon simulations.

-- In WWSIS-2, we calculated these wear-and-tear costs and emissions impacts. These data were-- incorporated into commercial software that simulates operations of the western grid (which-- includes the United States, Canada, and Mexico) on a subhourly basis, because wind and-- solar output can change within the hour. We designed five hypothetical scenarios to examine-- up to 33% wind and solar energy penetration in the Western U.S. and to compare the impacts-- of wind and solar. We then examined how wind and solar affected operation, costs, and emissions-- from fossil-fueled generators.

Germany with their aggressive timetable is expect to reach 20 cents a KWh in a few years and up to 40 cents when their transition to a more renewable sources come online. Sure it is possible, do you want to pay 40 cent a kWh?

Yup I call bullshit on the study. Germany is trying it and the savings clearly do not outweigh the costs. Renewable are freaking expensive and increasing the ratio even more so because the whole transmission framework needs to be upgraded.

Its amazing how studies like that ignore reality.

You do realize that the article was about one specific class of costs, and the final paragraph put those costs into the context of the general cost of renewable power? Or did you not read that far?

In that case the headline of the article is stupid?

Yes. Because God forbid that the author expects people to actually read the article.

I've not read the entire report yet, and I'll be leaving soon, but here are a few things this phase did not cover.

-- System reliability and stability issues were not the focus of this study either, but are being-- examined in Phase 3 of WWSIS.

-- Adding new, low-priced baseload generation can also cause the incumbent fossil-fueled plants-- to cycle more and have lower capacity factors (Milligan et al. 2011). An incumbent fossil-fueled-- plant that now has a lower capacity factor (and likely reduced revenue) and a higher O&M cost-- (because of cycling) might have a hard time remaining viable. This raises questions about who-- should pay for the cycling costs of incumbent plants or what happens in the marketplace to -- address the viability of a plant that might be needed for reliability but might no longer be profitable.-- These questions are not addressed in this technical report. .....

I was going to make this same point. If both renewable sources and fossil-fuel plants were owned by the same company, it would be easy. Since they generally are not, it's not necessarily in the interest of fossil-fuel plants to bear this load. They also have an opportunity cost of selling less power than their capacity. If the sale price of the power dropped low enough when there was excess power, it might be worthwhile for them to get off the market at those times, but aside from the problem that most customers aren't metered that way, it would also have a big impact on the payoff for the renewable sources.

And then on top of that, neither party is responsible for updating the grid itself, that's a third party who doesn't really care that their negligence is dragging down everybody else.

Not that getting off of fossil fuels and coal is bad, but manufacturing solar panels is a chemical heavy process that will produce its own caustic waste.

economic cost will be down but there we will be trading one type of waste for another and the materials needed for them are no more renewable than oil or coal.

they sound good now but what happens 35 years down the road when we have Appleseed like cities covered with millions of solar panels and we have to go several hundred million tons of Silicon & other assorted materials to replace them.

It seems folks are getting a bit carried away. On both sides. Renewables are interesting energy alternatives. The best use of these are yet to be determined. Certainly the very long term maintenance costs are unknown. This goes for both wind and solar. Grid costs are becoming known and are significant and will become more so. But there are also costs of maintaining wind and solar installations over decades in varied environments which are not known. Simply saving on fuel costs does not represent a total picture. Only after decades of energy integration will the true costs be evident. But that's exactly what we need to try to do. Use all energy sources integrated in the most optimal way without incurring outrages costs. Time will tell. Insufficient time has elapsed at this point to tell.

As long as wind turbines can bid their power into the auction at negative prices (due to subsidies), who in their right mind is going to want to build or maintain the fossil/nuclear/hydro plants that actually smoothes out the peaks and valleys in the supply/demand curve?

The thing is, those fossil/nuclear/hydro plants are required for grid stability. Intermittent sources (renewables) means that something else must cycle up/down to offset the variability. Spinning reserve is needed to be connected to the grid, to accept load should something else on the grid trip off unexpectedly. Additional generation must be kept close to ready by somebody, for those peak days.

Squeezing fossil/nuclear/hydro out of the base load role dramatically increases their operating costs when they do operate. Unless they are getting paid a stipend to be "ready", they must recoup their expenses during the fewer hours they operate. When they operate off of their design rating, they are less efficient, so the electricity costs more.

Net results seems to be a dramatic increase in the price of electricity. We seem to be following the German approach of hiding the cost of the renewables via tax incentives. However I don't think the German factory managers and steel mill managers appreciate having to cycle their factories and mills. Starting and stopping a large factory or steel mill to match electricity availability has enormous consequences on your bottom line.

Nice! HECO (Hawai'i Electric Company) seems to be dragging on solar options for consumers, limiting how many hikes can have panels. I hope this spurs more people into pushing solar and wind for Hawai'i, as our energy costs are high, and we're not what I'd call in a good position should energy problems arise.

Agreed, on Maui MECO limits residential solar PV installations to something like 10% of a "circuit's" capacity. I am not exactly sure what the circuits are but they cover geographical areas. Since electricity on Maui costs over 30 cents per kWh, and considering the tax rebates, PV systems pay off in less than 10 years. As a result, many areas on Maui are already hitting MECO's limit, stalling further adoption. Hopefully they will increase the limit as they gather and analyze more data.

Maui also has some large wind installations and some of the island's electricity is produced by burning leftover sugar cane biomass, which I guess is technically renewable. Of course, the population (and density) is pretty low.

In the long run, fossil fuels are only going to become more expensive (temporary natural gas glut notwithstanding), so it makes sense to develop renewable technologies now. But certainly they make more sense in certain locations than others.

It beggars the imagination that HI doesn't have real cheap geothermal.

Certainly the very long term maintenance costs are unknown. This goes for both wind and solar.

That's not really true. Photovoltaics have been in use for decades, and the maintenance costs (primarily cleaning and transformer replacements) are pretty well understood. Modern wind turbines are primarily different due to their scale, and most maintenance aspects should scale with them. The primary unknown for both of these are the use of new materials, like thin film solar and composite materials for wind. But those are likely to produce variation around a predictable value; they're not complete unknowns.

Squeezing fossil/nuclear/hydro out of the base load role dramatically increases their operating costs when they do operate.

Nobody is talking about squeezing nuclear off the base load. And hydro does just fine by not producing power and saving more water in the reservoir when that's an option. What we're talking about is strictly fossil fuels being spun up and down. Which is something they already had to do to a degree to match peak demand - they're just having to do it more often and on shorter notice now.

Perhaps the most significant news, however, is that the worst problems come earlier in the transition to renewables. "In terms of cycling costs," the report notes, "there may be a big step in going from 0 percent to 13 percent wind/solar but a much smaller step in going from 13 percent to 33 percent." In other words, once the percentage of renewables reaches a critical point, then the amount of adjustments we have to make becomes incremental.

We're seeing the opposite in Australia (although admittedly it's quite a different market design). Right now going from 0 to 13% doesn't really cost you anything because you don't actually have to cycle to accommodate that level of renewables. Thermal plant has to back off somewhat, but pretty much anything that really wants to stay on still can. It's when you start getting very high quantities of renewables that coal really needs to think about cycling to avoid a negative spot price.

Don't worry Australia will make up for any new renewables going in, especially with our new conservative government.

Some of the new coal mines waiting for approval, could become the worlds largest and the Galilee and Bowen basins the worlds largest coal mining complexAround 350 million tons of coal a year or 700 million tons of CO2(when burnt efficiently)

In the US, we have the following events working against wind and solar:1. Federal subsidies that have helped make these renewables even somewhat competitive either have expired or are about to, unless they have been extended and I haven't heard about it.

2. Cheap Chinese solar panels that recently started to flood the market finally brought some hope of reducing array installation costs. Unfortunately, US domestic panel makers complained that they couldn't compete, so the Feds rolled out some new tariffs on the Chinese parts. Instead of helping the domestic maufacturers be competitive, we chose to keep installation costs high for everyone.

3. Natural gas is significantly cheaper than renewables right now, even with subsidies, and looks likely to remain that way for quite some time. Energy production with natural gas also doesn't have the same kind of "warm-up" time that you have with coal or nuclear. It can go from 0% to 100% capacity production very quickly. Coal and nuclear usually never go all the way to 0% because of this "warm-up" period. They normally dial back to sort of a stand-by mode which helps a lot in speeding up this ramp up , but it's wasteful.

4. NIMBY. People like the idea of renewables like wind and solar, but Not In My Back Yard. Windmills literally drive people insane with the noise and shadows when too close to houses. Not to mention the tree-huggers that are concerned with bird and bat kills. Coal and nuclear don't do well in the NIMBY test either. Natural gas does pretty well, though, since it burns pretty clean. No fly ash or other radioactive waste that has no commercial use is always a bonus. Solar installations aren't bad, but people get heartburn over the toxic stuff that is needed to make the panels as well as concern over panel disposal at end of life. Gas turbines on the other hand are largely made of recyclable materials.

5. In the utility-scale renewable biz, only the biggest players like Seimens and General Electric are having much success. Pretty much everyone else is losing money or breaking even at best. The smaller players in the biz have extreme difficulty in ever being more than a bit player because of the way the industry is setup and how the costs for everything roll up. Site planners often aren't willing to give lesser known brands a shot, specially since they are rarely ever cheaper. With the way the smaller players have fallen out of business, like Solyndra or Clipper Windpower, site planners are very gun shy to go with these kinds of suppliers. They want to be sure they'll have support for the 20-30+ years these sites will be in operation. This effectively reduces competition in the market for the equipment. Less competition means higher costs.

Nice! HECO (Hawai'i Electric Company) seems to be dragging on solar options for consumers, limiting how many hikes can have panels. I hope this spurs more people into pushing solar and wind for Hawai'i, as our energy costs are high, and we're not what I'd call in a good position should energy problems arise.

Why are you using fuel at all when you're sitting on the Motherlode of geothermal energy? You have the trade winds most of the year, giving a great situation for wind generators. Few places on Earth are better situated to have 100% renewable energy.

Not that getting off of fossil fuels and coal is bad, but manufacturing solar panels is a chemical heavy process that will produce its own caustic waste.

economic cost will be down but there we will be trading one type of waste for another and the materials needed for them are no more renewable than oil or coal.

they sound good now but what happens 35 years down the road when we have Appleseed like cities covered with millions of solar panels and we have to go several hundred million tons of Silicon & other assorted materials to replace them.

Living as we do in a world that is currently using 8,000 million tons of coal every year, and creating similar quantities of other waste as a result, I'd think that we'd prefer to have only a few hundred million tons of panels to dispose of, once every 25 years.

Um, only to the taxpayers. In our Capitalist society, the wealthy stockholders reaped huge profits for years, until it crumbled, leaving "the government" to fix it.

California pays very high rates to make solar profitable which funds companies like Solar City with their very expensive rooftop panels. And massive profits to a few.

The question is how to fund/encourage something that is more expensive using the markets system. Subsidies? Massive tax credits? Create a company build it, then public offering the company when it become semi-profitable on just operations?

My ideal would be a Nuclear baseline 50-60%, hydro/geo/bio for a 10-15% semi-base, combo natural gas with variable overlap. Should provide a stable system without the worst offender coal.

Germany with their aggressive timetable is expect to reach 20 cents a KWh in a few years and up to 40 cents when their transition to a more renewable sources come online. Sure it is possible, do you want to pay 40 cent a kWh?

Nope. Electricity prices today are already over 0.4 $/kWh in Germany, and they are headed very quickly for the dollar range should renewables continue to get installed without any consideration of physics or market needs.

Nope. Electricity prices today are already over 0.4 $/kWh in Germany, and they are headed very quickly for the dollar range should renewables continue to get installed without any consideration of physics or market needs.

The consumer electricity price can't really be compared between countries if you want to compare their power generation choices, because it is affected so much by taxes and subsidies and other factors that don't necessarily have anything to do with how much they use renewable fuels.

For example, Germany and France trade electricity on the same exchange so their wholesale prices are generally equal, but consumer electricity prices are 0.265€/kWh for Germany vs. 0.145€/kWh for France.

There are of course national factors for wholesale prices as well, but at least there's one less layer of taxes and subsidies.

As long as wind turbines can bid their power into the auction at negative prices (due to subsidies), who in their right mind is going to want to build or maintain the fossil/nuclear/hydro plants that actually smoothes out the peaks and valleys in the supply/demand curve?

The thing is, those fossil/nuclear/hydro plants are required for grid stability. Intermittent sources (renewables) means that something else must cycle up/down to offset the variability. Spinning reserve is needed to be connected to the grid, to accept load should something else on the grid trip off unexpectedly. Additional generation must be kept close to ready by somebody, for those peak days.

Squeezing fossil/nuclear/hydro out of the base load role dramatically increases their operating costs when they do operate. Unless they are getting paid a stipend to be "ready", they must recoup their expenses during the fewer hours they operate. When they operate off of their design rating, they are less efficient, so the electricity costs more.

Net results seems to be a dramatic increase in the price of electricity. We seem to be following the German approach of hiding the cost of the renewables via tax incentives. However I don't think the German factory managers and steel mill managers appreciate having to cycle their factories and mills. Starting and stopping a large factory or steel mill to match electricity availability has enormous consequences on your bottom line.

AFAIK here in Germany the private population is paying extra fees to cover the greenery and companies are exempt (at least the power hungry ones). This makes a lot of sense as it is the population falling for the nukular is terribad and wind+solar is sent by angels with pink wings. The industry has been against the whole green thing from the start as they probably know enough math to realize just how bad idea it is. So the ones that are for the change should also pay the additional costs of the change. I just wish I could specify that I want to buy only nuclear produced power.

The German situation is not a good argument for or against green energy. The high energy price in Germany does not directly stem from the high price of renewable energy but from completely botched policy. I bet at least half the people here complaining about green energy would have solar panels on their roof in Germany, as you get a nice payoff from the investment. This *guaranteed* payoff needs to be payed by everyone (except the power hungry parts of the industry, as mentioned by others) so essentially average Joe pays for the people who can shell out >10k to have solar panels installed on their roof. (Considering that living for rent in apartments is the norm in Germany, a lot of people pay for few people with enough real estate and money.)

It actually states that Renewables are still more expensive than fossil fuels and significantly, it excludes the federal subsidies (2 cents per KWh on electricity that costs 4c, so a hefty mark-up). This subsidy is what makes it financially viable for the companies to invest in renewable and if it weren't for that subsidy and hypothetically the companies still produced via renewables, you'd see that cost passed on to the end purchaser making them look a lot less appealing. Of course the money does still come from us ultimately, but that cost is hidden as it just goes in via taxes and is given out as subsidies.

Now I actually don't necessarily have a problem with that in some ways as there are externalities with Fossil Fuels (e.g. pollution) and perhaps more significantly, they are finite and thus not a good long-term solution. But I do have a problem with the article casually dismissing nuclear power from its list with a brief handwave and muttering about it being complicated because of decommissioning costs. It amazes me how some seem to think no-one considers that when they build a nuclear power station. Hint: we have reasonable ideas of how much it will cost when we build them and those costs are factored in.

Nuclear power is around cost equivalent to gas and has far, far less environmental impact. In many cases, it actually has less environmental impact than wind in many cases, imo. That is because when wind proponents like to tout environmental advantages they always seem to think the land use is irrelevant. To generate a 1000MW output, you'd need a reactor that looks like a very big office block and you can site it pretty much anywhere (obviously near the coast provides cheap cooling however). The equivalent in wind farms would be a hundred square kilometres, iirc, filled with 90m tall turbines. You cannot place wind turbines too close together or they interfere with each other, obviously. You also can't just stick them out of site in some valley no-one cares about. They have to be sited in suitable wind locations to achieve the figures you read about.

Just to throw out a couple of concrete figures, a very modern wind turbine design by Vestas (which isn't even out yet), generates 8.0MW and is 105m in height. That's a quarter of the Empire State Building's height, for Americans. And that's height of the hub, btw. The blades obviously go higher.

Why is looking out of your window and seeing every inch of the country plastered in giant, thudding wind turbines not ever listed as an "environmental impact"? I (like a lot of environmentalists, who get shut out of representation by the big groups like Friends of the Earth who pretend to represent us) get very frustrated by this endless false dichotomy. It's not a choice between renewables and fossil fuels. It's a choice between renewables and nuclear.

Even in this report, take a look at Nuclear in all their charts of scaling up and down. It's flat on the charts whereas others are all over the place. Modern nuclear power station designs scale up and down very efficiently, unlike gas and can do so reliably, unlike wind.

I have less issue with solar - there's a small revolution coming in efficiency and solar can be scaled down to the small scale far more effectively than wind allowing discreet local production. But wind is in no way a viable choice over nuclear power. Not remotely close.

The rest is pretty much good. The fuel savings from not running the fossil fuel plants adds up to $7 billion, meaning the added costs are, at most, two percent of the savings.

I think that you have to distract the cost of the green energy from these fuel savings.Then you can compare the extra cost of wear and tear to the net savings/costs that come with the choice for renewable energy. This might mean that the added costs are, probably, a lot more than two percent of the 'difference'.

I think it is intellectually dishonest to put the cost of the fuel out there as a big number (7 billion!) without putting the cost of the renewable energy next to it.

The basic issue all these discussions miss is that the main factor determining how much useful energy you get out of your energy system is the energy density of the fuel (uranium, oil, gas, wind, solar flux). This is basic thermodynamics. No matter what you do if you have very low density fuel you will have to use up a lot more energy to get an unit useful energy compared to a fuel that has high density.

This is why nuclear followed by hydro is so clean. Exceptionally high energy density of the fuel and not amount of research and development is going to change this.

As long as wind turbines can bid their power into the auction at negative prices (due to subsidies), who in their right mind is going to want to build or maintain the fossil/nuclear/hydro plants that actually smoothes out the peaks and valleys in the supply/demand curve?

The thing is, those fossil/nuclear/hydro plants are required for grid stability. Intermittent sources (renewables) means that something else must cycle up/down to offset the variability. Spinning reserve is needed to be connected to the grid, to accept load should something else on the grid trip off unexpectedly. Additional generation must be kept close to ready by somebody, for those peak days.

Squeezing fossil/nuclear/hydro out of the base load role dramatically increases their operating costs when they do operate. Unless they are getting paid a stipend to be "ready", they must recoup their expenses during the fewer hours they operate. When they operate off of their design rating, they are less efficient, so the electricity costs more.

Net results seems to be a dramatic increase in the price of electricity. We seem to be following the German approach of hiding the cost of the renewables via tax incentives. However I don't think the German factory managers and steel mill managers appreciate having to cycle their factories and mills. Starting and stopping a large factory or steel mill to match electricity availability has enormous consequences on your bottom line.

AFAIK here in Germany the private population is paying extra fees to cover the greenery and companies are exempt (at least the power hungry ones). This makes a lot of sense as it is the population falling for the nukular is terribad and wind+solar is sent by angels with pink wings. The industry has been against the whole green thing from the start as they probably know enough math to realize just how bad idea it is. So the ones that are for the change should also pay the additional costs of the change. I just wish I could specify that I want to buy only nuclear produced power.

The industry doesn't have to pay externalities. I fully support nuclear power and research, and I do think it's likely to be the final solution, but good math for business is not the same as good math for society.

As long as wind turbines can bid their power into the auction at negative prices (due to subsidies), who in their right mind is going to want to build or maintain the fossil/nuclear/hydro plants that actually smoothes out the peaks and valleys in the supply/demand curve?

The thing is, those fossil/nuclear/hydro plants are required for grid stability. Intermittent sources (renewables) means that something else must cycle up/down to offset the variability. Spinning reserve is needed to be connected to the grid, to accept load should something else on the grid trip off unexpectedly. Additional generation must be kept close to ready by somebody, for those peak days.

Squeezing fossil/nuclear/hydro out of the base load role dramatically increases their operating costs when they do operate. Unless they are getting paid a stipend to be "ready", they must recoup their expenses during the fewer hours they operate. When they operate off of their design rating, they are less efficient, so the electricity costs more.

Net results seems to be a dramatic increase in the price of electricity. We seem to be following the German approach of hiding the cost of the renewables via tax incentives. However I don't think the German factory managers and steel mill managers appreciate having to cycle their factories and mills. Starting and stopping a large factory or steel mill to match electricity availability has enormous consequences on your bottom line.

AFAIK here in Germany the private population is paying extra fees to cover the greenery and companies are exempt (at least the power hungry ones). This makes a lot of sense as it is the population falling for the nukular is terribad and wind+solar is sent by angels with pink wings. The industry has been against the whole green thing from the start as they probably know enough math to realize just how bad idea it is. So the ones that are for the change should also pay the additional costs of the change. I just wish I could specify that I want to buy only nuclear produced power.

The industry doesn't have to pay externalities. I fully support nuclear power and research, and I do think it's likely to be the final solution, but good math for business is not the same as good math for society.

In this case it is. LCAs are complicated things but in general it all goes back to what I wrote above. Energy density of your fuel.Companies might be looking mainly at profit but there is nothing inherently wrong with that as compared to public way of more or less following a religious conviction that "green" is awesome.

What is good for society is making decision based on our best knowledge and not beliefs or feelings or similar that is generally controlled not by intellect but by PR.Physics says that some things will always need huge amount of energy to sustain the system and nothing is ever going to change that. Talking about that it's very popular to ignore the environmental cost of making all those solar cells and wind turbines. Neither is very clean process or undemanding from energy point of view.

Why don't power companies invest energy storage systems, such as flywheels or superconducting loops, to allow them to continuing operating plants without loss output? They would still need to shutdown when the storage system was at capacity, but properly implemented it would make required shutdown less frequent and allow them to be scheduled and planned for in advance.

In this case it is. LCAs are complicated things but in general it all goes back to what I wrote above. Energy density of your fuel.Companies might be looking mainly at profit but there is nothing inherently wrong with that as compared to public way of more or less following a religious conviction that "green" is awesome.

What is good for society is making decision based on our best knowledge and not beliefs or feelings or similar that is generally controlled not by intellect but by PR.Physics says that some things will always need huge amount of energy to sustain the system and nothing is ever going to change that. Talking about that it's very popular to ignore the environmental cost of making all those solar cells and wind turbines. Neither is very clean process or undemanding from energy point of view.

I just want to reinforce this factoid. I simply cannot hear the religous mantra of "OMG fossil fuels are scarce, it is running out. OMG! OMG! OMG!" It is an "argument" made by idiots incapable of even the tiniest amount of non-emotional thought.

Fact is, there is no substance in the entire world that is produced more by mankind than fossil fuels. We are fucking swimming in it, there is no shortage in human time spans in sight, and those idiots aren't even noticing it. Per Wikipedia and BP's Statistical Review of World energy a list of the most produced products by mankind in the year 2012:

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Coal: 7864 million tons per yearOil: 4277 million tons per yearCement: 3400 million tons per yearAll agriculture: ~2700 million tons per yearNatural gas: 2411 million tons per yearSteel: 1550 million tons per year...Maize 820 million tons per yearGrains 720 million tons per yearRice 670 million tons per year. ..Aluminium: 44 million tons per year...Copper: 15 million tons per year

Did I say that renewables consume a factor of 10 to 100 more ressources in the form cement, steel, copper, etc. than conventional power plants? Resources that are significantly more scarce than fossil fuels?

Seriously, scarcity is the worst argument of all arguments to be against fossil fuels.

External costs due to pollution and CO2, on the other hand, are very good reasons to be against fossil fuels.

Why don't power companies invest energy storage systems, such as flywheels or superconducting loops, to allow them to continuing operating plants without loss output? They would still need to shutdown when the storage system was at capacity, but properly implemented it would make required shutdown less frequent and allow them to be scheduled and planned for in advance.

Because all storage solutions cost in the order of 1-2$ per kWh of delivered electricity?